Four Maryland officers on leave after traffic stop results in officer-involved shooting, fatality

https://www.foxnews.com/us/maryland-officers-leave-traffic-stop-shooting-fatality

What does the headline mean? What does it imply? Does the headline in any way resemble the actual events? Before I get into the details, let me establish a baseline that one can use when evaluating news stories. The primary reason for MSM to report the news is to sell tampons and toilet paper. Everything else is secondary.

Let me parse the headline. Four officers conducted a traffic stop. You know what a traffic stop is. On average, a driver in the United States gets stopped every eighteen months.

Here is the description from the body of the story: Montgomery County officers performed a traffic stop in Silver Spring Wednesday morning because the white Mercedes-Benz matched the description of the vehicle belonging to a suspect involved in a shooting at around 4:15 a.m.

What happened in Montgomery County was a traffic stop in that, vehicles were involved. But it in no way resembled a traffic stop that most people are familiar with. The officers stopped the vehicle because they were investigating a felony, attempted murder. In the cop trade that calls for a “felony stop.” Here is what a felony stop looks like.

An astute observer will note none of the cops pictured above have a ticket book in hand. Most drivers will never experience a felony stop. This is not a “traffic stop, it is a felony stop.” A felony stop gives the police the advantage and is intended to lower the level of violence. A crook has three choices in a confrontation, fight, flight or surrender. The felony stop is designed to make surrender the most attractive option.

In the Montgomery County incident, the crook decided to fight.

The suspect then got out of his car with a handgun and shot at the officers. The officers returned fire, striking and killing the suspect,

Montgomery County Police Chief Marcus Jones 

Back to the headline, the four officers (involved) were placed on leave.

I might be dating myself. Starsky and Hutch were two TV cops who week in, and week out shot bad guys and wrecked a dozen cars before the first commercial break. No matter how much mayhem they caused they never once wrote a report. Half the time they couldn’t be bothered to remain at the scene. They had more important things to do.

The reality is any cop that heard the sound of gunfire at an officer involved shooting is going to spend the foreseeable future writing reports. Hit or miss (giving or receiving) the involved officer is off the street. Depending on the police department, they might be assigned to duty in the subbasement of the police station or sent home to await the results of the investigation.

In other words, the administrative action is part of the process and is not a deviation from the norm.

“The four officers that were involved in this have all been placed on administrative leave, pending the outcome of this investigation,” 

Montgomery County Police Chief Marcus Jones 

The headline is silent. The article identifies that The Maryland State Police, and the Maryland Attorney General are conducting the investigation. The article doesn’t mention that the Montgomery County Sheriff will conduct a parallel investigation to determine if the officers followed established policy. Nor does it mention that the FBI/DOJ will be waiting in the wings to review the efforts of all three.

How many readers are subject to that level of review for a job-related action.

And all of them will be answerable to the ignorant pricks whose main priority is to sell tampons and toilet paper.